Monday, February 6, 2012

Deep End: possible PID clue movie?

A movie starring Jane Asher (former girlfriend of Beatle Paul) from 1971 has been salvaged from obscurity. Was it censored for many decades because it revealed PID clues? The critically-acclaimed film is being re-released on May 6, 2012, so it might be worth watching to see if it reveals anything about James Paul McCartney's fate. It is quite possible, especially considering that another movie by the same director (Judd Bernard) outed the Illuminati's depopulation agenda.

It's not uncommon for movies to drop out of circulation and simply disappear, as fans of Deep End will attest. Barely seen since its release in 1971, the film concerns Mike (played by John Moulder-Brown), a floppy-fringed 15-year-old who becomes dangerously infatuated with Susan (Jane Asher), his co-worker at the public baths. What's unusual about this prolonged absence is that it should have befallen a film so passionately admired. The influential critic Andrew Sarris thought it measured up to the best of Godard, Truffaut and Polanski. The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt called it "a work of peculiar, cock-a-hoop gifts". If something as venerated as Deep End can sink, what hope for the rest of cinema?

After years of being mired in rights issues, this vivid, rapturous film is about to return in a restored print. It's appropriate that such an elusive picture should transpire to not be quite what it seems. What could have been just another coming-of-age story is transformed by an absurdist sensibility, uninhibited performances and a heightened use of colour. Although considered a defining British work, as well as one of the most acute screen portraits of London, Deep End is actually a US/German co-production, written and directed by a Pole (Jerzy Skolimowski, best known then for co-scripting Polanski's Knife in the Water), and shot largely in Munich.

There are glimpses of the capital – the exterior of the public baths was in Leytonstone, London, while Soho is the setting for a dreamlike sequence in which Mike visits the boudoir of a prostitute whose leg is in a cast, before purchasing an excessive quantity of hot dogs from Burt Kwouk (Kato from the Pink Panther films).

Jane Asher remembers receiving the script. "It was a bit of a mess," she says. "Jerzy's English wasn't great at the time. I remember sitting up late every night rewriting my dialogue. But Susan was terrific to play. She's at that stage where she's completely aware of her sexual power and uses it ruthlessly. Now that I've got two sons of my own, I feel more protective of Mike, more so than back then, when perhaps I was a bit more like her myself."

Skolimowski maintains that he cast John Moulder-Brown as soon as the 16-year-old walked into his office. ("His charm and innocence were obvious.") The actor has a different recollection. "I was trying to be very sophisticated, smoking cigarettes and being cool," he says now. "I must have looked ridiculous. Jerzy thought I wasn't vulnerable enough, but the producer Judd Bernard persuaded him to give me a screen test, and that convinced him. I was going through the same adolescent period as Mike. Unlike him, I was lucky enough to have had girlfriends, but I still had that rawness. For me it became all about allowing emotions I understood as a teenager to have a life within the context of the scenes."

Despite his youth, Moulder-Brown was undaunted about working so intimately with Asher. "She had broken up with [her fiance] Paul McCartney by then, so there may have been some sensitivity about that – you know, better not start humming any Beatles tunes. But she didn't arrive as a celebrity, just a member of the team." The two actors' easygoing rapport is one of the film's joys, and a consequence of the playful atmosphere fostered by Skolimowski. "Jerzy is very charming," says Asher. "He's not one of those directors who use fear, but you still felt a core of steel. He knew what he wanted."

The cast were free to improvise, and were instructed to remain in character even if a take went awry. "There's a bit where I'm on my bicycle, riding alongside Jane's car," says Moulder-Brown. "I was supposed to stop the bike in front of the vehicle, but it was raining and the brakes didn't work, so the bike skidded, hit the pavement and I went flying. As I was in the air, I remember thinking, 'We've got to keep going because this is going to look great.' When I landed, I could just hear Jerzy calling out: 'Kip feelming! Kip feelming!'"

While the spine of the picture is Mike's growing obsession with Susan, there are priceless incidental pleasures along the way, notably a cameo by Diana Dors as one of the boy's more demanding clients. This blonde typhoon in polka dots makes the bewildered hero an accessory to orgasm, clutching him to her bosom as she conducts aloud a George Best fantasy ("Tackle, dribble, dribble, score!").

"What a lady!" Skolimowski exclaims. "Casting her was such an event. When she put on the ridiculous costume we had prepared, she looked at herself in the mirror and said, 'So. This is how you see me?' I said, 'You look fantastic!'"

"Jerzy would seduce people into doing whatever he wanted them to do," says Moulder-Brown. "In that scene with Di, she really bared her soul: this glamorous star suddenly allowed herself to be that vamping caricature."

Skolimowski's powers of persuasion extended beyond the cast. He had his friend Cat Stevens write But I Might Die Tonight, the movie's opening song. Markedly different was Mother Sky, a grinding 14-minute number by Can that plays during the Soho sequence. The two songs represent opposing impulses in both Mike and the film: the Cat Stevens is tender and hopeful, while the Can is "a bit of a downer", Skolimowski says.

From conception to completion, Deep End took scarcely more than six months. The consensus when it premiered at the Venice film festival in September 1970 was that it would have been a dead cert for the Golden Lion, if only the prize-giving hadn't been suspended the previous year. "The organisers had decided it should all be democratic," grumbles Skolimowski. "Every film equal, or some idiotic idea."

Early indications that the picture's downbeat ending might prove problematic for audiences were felt at the San Francisco film festival. "I was supposed to do a Q&A afterwards," the director says. "The organisers brought me to the cinema, they were so happy – 'Oh, the whole room is laughing and enjoying the film.' Then in the last five minutes the room fell silent. When it finished, there was no applause. They said to me, 'Let's forget the Q&A and go for dinner.' During the meal, some audience members came over and said, 'Look, you had such a fantastic film, 90 minutes of enjoyment and humour. Why did you ruin it with the last five minutes?' I told them, 'You know what? I made the film for those last five minutes.'"

Deep End never matched its critical success at the box office, and was soon relegated to the bottom half of a doomed-love double-bill with Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. "It still seems very fresh to me," says Skolimowksi. "That surprised me. It hasn't aged." Moulder-Brown hasn't seen the film for 40 years. "I don't like watching myself. But I liked Deep End. It had charm. Whenever I went for auditions after that, it was always the one everyone mentioned." Asher believes the film's idiosyncrasies have helped insulate it from the ravages of time. "I don't think it's dated at all. But then it didn't fit its time even when it first came out. It always was an odd one."

12 comments:

Hi. I didn't quite catch what clues you thought it had or might have -- but I was in a hurry reading. Do clarify or highlight anything you thought might be PID, if you don't mind (unless you mean there might be stuff in the film, which is a good point on its own).

What we can ask you for sure right now is, which film of Judd Bernard do you think was about depopulation?

And may I mention that in 1967 he did a film ostensibly about Elvis having a DOUBLE. It was called "Double Trouble" and not only starred Elvis, but note the following (from Wikipedia):

"Despite being set in London and Europe, Elvis filmed it entirely in Hollywood.

Co star Norman Rossington holds a unique place in music/film history as being the only actor to have appeared with Elvis and the Beatles (A Hard Day's Night)."

The movie which reveals the Depopulation Plan was released in 1974 under the title "The Marseille Contract" and was later renamed "The Destructors" in reference to the Global Elite bent upon the destruction of humanity.

It is my personal belief that not only were the Beatles' upper hand puppeteers looking to subvert the youth of the day with LSD and other illicit fare, I believe this was part of a much bigger picture - one to completely destroy the family unit. With the advent of the Pill (classic, classic depopulation tool - in fact the Pill was originally used as a eugenicist weapon), the legalization of abortion (also another depopulation eugenicist tool and a monstrous one at that), insanely high divorce rates and rampant promiscuity among other things, the Elite managed to conquer nearly an entire generation of Baby Boomers and influenced Generations X and Y as a result.

Make no mistake Sir FAUL has promoted things like the Pill and LSD usage since the very beginning. Reading FAUL's biography "Many Years From Now" (can't call it Paul's biography since he didn't write it), made it evident what his agenda was loud and clear. The smugness and arrogance of this wretched imposter nearly blows my mind and it's painfully obvious if one reads his "recollections" or watches his interviews. I watched a portion of the Grammys last night and it was depressing to see people kissing his ass when he most certainly does not deserve Paul's name and status. Sir FAUL is attempting and sadly succeeding in obliterating JPM's name from history...which is very, very sad.

The word eugenicist is properly a wider term than you use it to mean. There are two types of eugenic ideal, sometimes mixed in the same speaker. The one side of the picture is against the low classes' existence, and the other side of the picture is for better circumstances for the poor by promoting better relations between the sexes, including that women not be held captive by their biological decisions in having sex and carrying the child no matter what (or dying in an abortion done unsafely when you're poor and it's illegal). The two positions, as I said, can be mixed in the same speaker: they can have nasty things to say about the low classes and also want to promote some positive options for them.

In this, you are therefore confused. Just as the eugenicists themselves get confused, flip flop.

Just because the Pill was bad for women and, among others, elites promoted it, and some men took advantage of the fact women were on it, does not mean it hasn't helped also to increase solutions in women's lives. Just because abortion is legal and, among others, elites promoted it, does not mean that some women don't struggle with the decision, and that it is for the others a bad idea: it increases options for women which men more often feel they have -- i.e., to walk away from the care of a child and live a chosen life before having a child (if at all). This increases possibilities for many men and women to actually get to know themselves better, to dialogue about decisions, and over time this increases the friendship aspect and less guilting by each other, in general.

Are there bad things involved in these developments sometimes? Yes. Are there bad reasons some people promote them? Yes. But in the end, women are not enslaved to biology this way, and the social relations after the initial mere promiscuity, have improved; it may not look this way in some cases, because those particular people (men or women) end up still hooked to someone who is manipulative.

Faul or anyone's promotion of the Pill (and by association, abortion) can have had high motive. Leary was a Crowleyite, CIA guy, but he was because he thought he was helping bring a larger sense of the beauty of the world (magic) to the world, rather than because of Crowley's sicker side. A lot of people would do that or believe that now. Faul is into magic(k) and probably negatively as well as positively, but he would not have to hate the world's poor population, to promote the Pill. Get real.

I had to make note of a comparison I did (which anybody can do)of The Beatles live in concert pre and post PID. After comparing 2 live performances of 'Yesterday' - one from live t.v. 1965 and the other from the Candlestick Park show - it clearly shows (in spite of the poor bootleg quality from the Candlestick concert) the higher register of Faul as compared to Paul.

Paul had a very beautiful voice that was deeper, mellow, harmonic, and full. Even in the older recordings (I own original albums) his voice is distinctive. Faul has a higher, shallow, and tin quality, which is why he cannot sing many of Paul's melodies because of range and tenor. Faul was smart to put loud bands over his voice to hide this fact. Even the accent, or cadence of speech is off. Paul hailed from northern England where heavy Scottish influence is evident in their speech. Faul has no natural cadence, but is feigned. When I met John and Faul in 1968, I sensed something was peculiar about him. He was very nice, but his looks threw me for a loop and his non interaction with John. Very disturbing........even now after all these years.

I've been spending the past few months trying to educate the non believers on youtube that Paul was replaced with a look alike. You would not believe the threats and hate mail I've recieved. I've been researching this for a few years , and have found that people are just blind to the fact that Paul actually did die in 1966,or have they somehow been brainwashed ?